Ben Thompson excellent again. The price of undifferentiated software converges to zero and therefore three main business models he sees are:
Another great one by Mr. Asymco:
My contention is that app time will impact many of these incumbent media and that both the effect and the consequences will be hard to measure in advance or even ex post facto. These new media objects are not measured easily and therefore are flying under the radar of traditional metrics used by the industry. Such absence of reliable measurement is one of the hallmarks of a disruptive shift in industry: You can’t perceive what you can’t measure and you certainly can’t manage it.
I believe the logic for Apple is that usage of the products determines their value and therefore placing powerful software in the hands of more users means they will value the entire system more. This leads to the notion of greater “stickiness” or “lock-in” but also to higher satisfaction and loyalty, rate of upgrades and even more third party purchases and yet more usage.This is the virtuous cycle platform custodians seek to engender. This is what Apple is trying to build and the transition of apps into the system bundle is part of this re-enforcement.
One wonders how long before Apple’s approach becomes the norm for other platforms.
Jakob Nielsen publishes an Alertbox:
People can use computer systems for years without knowing about features that would be very useful to them. This is true even for productivity applications that people rely on for their livelihood, such as email, word processing, and spreadsheets. In testing intranets, we frequently find that employees are unaware of key enterprise features.This seems like a paradox, because users would gain substantial benefits — potentially accrued over several years — if only they bothered to spend a few moments looking around the user interface. The ROI seems clear.
However, while users might have a mathematically true ROI from learning more about user interfaces, the ROI might not be so clear from a behavioral standpoint. The problem is that the investment occurs immediately: users must suffer the interaction cost of navigating through obscure parts of the user interface. In contrast, the benefit is deferred: users realize it only in small increments in some undefined future moments when they might use newly discovered features.
And then he provides tips on how to encourage learing. First among them: Fewer features.
Well worth a read. To quote:
With the iPhone 5C Apple may well have created what will prove to be the most popular smartphone in the world, based almost entirely on year-old technology, distinguished only by its colorful plastic casing — yet still sold at premium prices compared to the rest of the industry. Not bad.
And this about 5S:
To put that in context, the iPhone 5S beats my 2008 15-inch MacBook Pro by a small measure in the Sunspider benchmark (with the MacBook Pro running the latest Safari 6.1 beta). The iPhone 5S is, in some measures, computationally superior to the top-of-the-line MacBook Pro from just five years ago. In your fucking pocket.
Horace Dediu thinking about the Apple’s M7 chip:
Perhaps this is why Apple chose to describe the iPhone 5s as “forward-thinking”. The M7 and the Touch ID are like research projects whose actual value will be realized at some future time, in probably different contexts. The M series of chips may become Apple’s “low end” microprocessor as the A series climbs the trajectory into core computing tasks (read: phone, tablets, TV, laptops).M might be the chip for the wearable segment, woven into a whole new fabric of uses and jobs to be done.
Kathy Sierra writing for gapingvoid:
“The key to understanding (and ultimately benefitting from) true “customer loyalty” is to recognize and respect that customers–as people – are deeply loyal to themselves and those they love, but not to products and brands. They are loyal to their own values and the (relatively few) people and causes they truly believe in. What looks and feels like loyalty to a product, brand, company, etc. is driven by what that product, service, brand says about who we are and what we value.”
3 kB minified jQuery to ease your work with content tabs.
Ryan Singer sums it up nicely. Some points I particularly liked:
The reason I am making a product is to give people capability they lack. That’s why they pay for it. The gap between the person’s current situation and the situation they want to be in defines value for them. They hire your product to do a job. The job is their definition of progress from here to there.
Some people think patterns are formal things written in a book or collection, but they aren’t like that. They are natural and spontaneous just like spoken language. We learn a language by hearing it and speaking it. Words, phrases, and constructions come to mind as if by magic.
This works against you when your work isn’t goal-directed. R&D projects and exploratory design don’t benefit from narrow problem definition. Platform and infrastructure projects are different in kind from product projects because the platform is meant to enable products on top of it, which are themselves targeted at specific situations.
Ben Thompson excells again:
But in reality – and this touches on many of the themes of this blog – an overt focus on product similarities misses many crucial factors that, in my opinion, make iPhones and iPads very different. In fact, I believe the business we should be looking at to understand where Apple might take the iPad is the iPod, not the iPhone.
If you are interested in business thinking at all, read it.
I would love for Horace and Ben to do a business podcast together.
Another great post by Ben Thompson over at stratēchery:
Steve Ballmer restructured Microsoft yesterday as a functional organization. The immensity of this change can not be understated, nor can the risks. Ultimately, I believe the reorganization will paralyze the company and hasten its decline.
Read it.
Robert Hoekman writes for Smashing Magazine:
Following is my list of 13 beliefs on the value of user experience strategy, design, and designers, one for every year I’d been in the web industry at the time I wrote it in 2012:Tenet 1:
“User experience is the net sum of every interaction a person has with a company, be it marketing collateral, a customer service call, or the product or service itself. It is affected by the company’s vision and the beliefs it holds and its practices, as well as the service or product’s purpose and the value it holds in a person’s life.”
Read it. I identify myself with all 13 of them.
Robert is the author of Designing the Obvious which is worth a read too.
Via @sixrevisions
Ben Thompson over at stratēchery:
It’s games like Candy Crush Saga – free, with in-app purchase – that are fueling much of that $10 billion. According to App Annie, for the iPhone:– 95 out of the top 100 grossing apps feature in-app purchase
– 79 out of the top 100 grossing apps are free to downloadThe numbers are broadly similar on Android, with an even sharper skewing towards free: 96 out of 100 of the top 100 grossing apps are free to download.
For my czech readers Tomáš Baťa needs no introduction, for the foreigners here: He is czech version of Henry Ford, for shoe industry, and more morally grounded one.
Nice people in Tomas Bata University Library, Audioknihy.net and Tomas Bata Foundation with the financial support of Tomas Bata University in Zlin has produced free audiobook. Profesionally read by Alfred Strejček in czech version and by Josef Guruncz in the english.
Download the czech or english version of the audiobook (MP3, 770 MB).
Ben Thompson over at stratēchery:
The truth about the greatest commercial of all time – Think Different – is that the intended audience was Apple itself. Jobs took over a demoralized company on the precipice of bankruptcy, and reminded them them that they were special, and, that Jobs was special. It was the beginning of a new chapter.“Designed in California” should absolutely be seen in the same light. This is a commercial for Apple on the occasion of a new chapter; we just get to see it.
See also, the beautiful web page for this mission statement by Apple.
There’s a YouTube playlist by The Fuqua School of Business with seven short videos (about 3 minutes each) from interview with Apple CEO.
You can play them all here.
Via Daring Fireball
Matt Gemmel in thoughtful essay:
We forget that physical objects are also just specific embodiments – or presentations – of their content and function. A paperback book and an ebook file are two embodiments of the text they each contain; the ebook isn’t descended from the paperback. They’re siblings, from different media spheres, one of which happens to have been invented more recently.The biggest intellectual stumbling-block we’re facing is the fallacy that just because physical embodiments came first, they’re also somehow canonical.
…
That’s what [Jony] Ive is talking about, I think. He’s not saying that skeuomorphic or embellished design is “bad” in any absolute sense, but rather that it’s false. It’s obviously false on the visual level, but the issue runs much deeper: it’s false because it implies that you can generalise experiences from different realms of interaction. It’s making promises that not only inevitably fail to deliver in some way, but also actually compromise the uniqueness, and quality, and essence of what you’re creating.
One of the best This American Life epizodes I’ve heard.
It’s spring, so we’re opening windows and going places. This week we have stories of people who, for reasons that they can’t always explain, feel compelled to get out and go somewhere. Including the story of one man who decides to take a trip from Philadelphia to San Francisco — by foot.